The 1991 Gulf War was known as the first space war, with satellites providing intelligence, communications links and, perhaps most crucially, the Global Positioning System.

But those achievements will be dwarfed by the technological advances likely to be introduced to the battlefield during the 2003 Gulf war.

The Afghan war saw the unveiling of further new gadgetry, most striking was the unmanned combat aerial vehicle. The other less trumpeted advance of the Afghan conflict was the use of the satellite GPS to transform huge, old-fashioned, "dumb" bombs into the JDAM (Joint Direct Action Munition) - effectively creating guided missiles that could glide down on to targets from 24 kilometres away.

Now, two years later, the Pentagon is confident that high-tech weaponry will play an even more decisive role. In the 1991 war, only one in 10 bombs was a smart bomb, guided to its target by laser. Now only one in 10 is not. While the smart bombs are destroying military bunkers, psychological warfare experts will be bombarding Saddam's aides with emails and telephone messages urging them to give him up. But they will need to do that before the really big technological advance of the 2003 Gulf war - the non-lethal bomb - is deployed.

The new non-lethal weapons include the Blackout bomb, which throw out a confetti of tiny carbon filaments which fall over power lines and transformers short-circuiting power stations and electricity networks.");document.write("

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The Pentagon hopes that the star of the show will be the E-bomb, a high-powered microwave bomb sending out a powerful pulse, which can disable electrical and electronic circuits.

It can even penetrate underground bunkers, via the ventilation shafts, shutting off the computer systems, the air-conditioning and, crucially for biological weapons factories, refrigeration systems.